So, I got response from the author which made me want to spend money somewhere else

Hi, that is actually some very interesting piece of information, but could you elaborate a bit? I’m actually considering to purchase The Grove, but since it’s so expensive I would love to have some advice…

The Grove offers a great value for its price and imho it is the best tree generator for blender (native addon). It also has quite nice development and every new version brings nice improvements. The only generator that is no doubt better is the Speed Tree which is like five times more expensive and the trees are not optimized when imported to blender (no instances for twigs) - so you have better quality and much worse performance and price.
IMHO The Grove is a great addon and it is worth every penny.

I just bought this with some twig models for an architecture visualization project and wow, it’s great. Most fun I’ve had at work in some time. It’s actually based on biology and you can grow a huge variation of trees an bushes that pretty much all look great. It even has a raytracer to calculate how the tree reacts to light as it grows.

Yesterday evening I went to the nearby forest to get some local variety tree branches to make twig models from. Found some chopped down trees by the railway so I got some from fully grown pines and spruces.

I don’t think it’s very expensive considering you get unlimited tree and bush models with it. Not to mention you can grow them on your models realistically and do all sorts of fantasy/horror stuff too. Really inspiring piece of software, and I love the fact it’s a Blender addon and not standalone.

It’s easy to do stuff like this too, just couple of minutes of tweaking:

Hi all,
i just purchased The Grove and it seems nice.
I plant to use it to make animated trees for lightwave, but i have a problem and i wonder if someone can help me in solving it.
The Grove relies on particle system to duplicate twigs. When i export to LW or any other app, i must use an instancing system to replicate twigs as in Blender.
While this is nice since it helps in saving memory, it’s also a limit because some apps do not support instances of instances - this means that i can have a tree with instanced leaves in LW or other apps, but i will not be able to instance the tree many times to create an animated forest.
So, i need to transform the tree in a single animated mesh in Blender, and export both geometry and MDD file.
Since i’m a newbie in Blender, i need to know what’s the process to do this.

I bought it yesterday and I was disappointed to discover that no twigs are included with the plugin. Today I spent all the day making a custom pine twig to try visualize something but I think I still have to learn a lot. Maybe it’s good cause it takes in account many natural factors ant it’s pretty fast to use for casual architectural renderings, but I think if Modular Tree gets improved in the means of usability and stability a little bit more it’ll get better than The Grove, artistically speaking.

Grove, is surely not for hobbyists. It does not include twigs, which you have to buy separately or create yourself. If you create yourself, why not create a whole tree ))). Moreover, beginners may have issue of getting realistic enough. For hobbyists, in-build addon saplings do good job. When I need photorealistic thing, better just to keep some high quality trees (downloaded from various sources) and use a particle system - which is pretty straightforward thing with complete control on where trees are shown, what size, etc.
Yes, grove had been an excellent choice if it had enough of assets, twigs, all in single pack ready to work immediately.
With that all said, it is still a powerful addon, and worth buying for professional need (for professionals requirements differ, moreover, every penny spent is recovered).
In case of trees (for hobbyists), creating with ease is important, as they are not the main actors in most scenes, rather a beautiful props.